Adapt.
There’s no stopping this train.
every bit of improvement is a higher chance to avoid some of the most catastrophic outcomes (where the unlikely but possible worst outcome being a mass extinction chain reaction which humanity will find very very hard to survive in a functioning manner/without losing their future)
so still worth fighting for any improvement even if we can't avoid a catastrophe anymore, as there is a huge margin between what we still can archive, and what we might end up with if we stop fighting and are quite unlucky
But it's also clear, it won't be enough. Emissions are not only still increasing, they likely won't stop increasing in my lifetime (in the next 50 years.)
We must adapt. The earth is going to get a lot warmer, and wetter in some parts, and drier in others, and sea levels will likely keep slowly rising for many centuries to come, if not millennia.
On the other hand: nuclear war, genetic engineering, or just plain bad luck (carrington event, asteroid impact) seem much more likely to actually wipe out modern society
It's not an extinction level event (not for humans anyway, it may well be for many other species.) It's not a candidate for the great filter.
There will be migration, but over centuries, not a sudden exodus. There may be wars, but what's new.
I don't see it. Maybe at worst it's a temporary setback, not a permanent one.
We'll never know the counterfactual, but I think if coal didn't exist what you would have seen is an increased focus on hydropower instead. That would have meant industrialisation would have been slower and distributed completely differently geographically, but would still have happened in my opinion
e.g. if you want the true climate damage done by a country you would have to look at all the damage done by producing all the goods consumed there. This isn't very practical doable. But if you e.g. mass import Chinese goods you can't only blame China for the climate damage done in context of producing those goods (but neither can you take away all the fault from them, they still decide how to produce the goods in the end and we (west) motivate them to do so badly).
This also applies to Oil producing countries etc.
And some non amicable countries are so because they see no way to handle their economical situation if they tried to change it. But if countries where to work better together they might find a way forward. And sometimes innovation can fix that by itself. E.g. solar cells have gotten absurdly good to a point where sometimes they just out compete non-renewables on purely economical benefits. That is, if your government doesn't do regulations to actively prevent this (weather it's by hindering solar or by hugely subventionieren oil/coal/gas).
So the situation is both better and worse then the statistics above make it look. Better as you could move production away from non amicable countries and boycott their products and "convince" some of them by giving them a economical feasible means to improve. Worse because we know this won't happen and it means its not just "their fault" but quite often indirectly partially our fault, too.
Also lets be realistic thanks to corruption, short term thinking(e.g. next election) and sometimes plain stupidity many countries which try to get away from oil/coal/gas have done such horrible bad decisions that they not only completely fucked avoiding climate change but also have put their economy in a thought spot. When then is taken out of context and used by people like Trump as an example why fighting climate change is supposedly a scam.
This hyperbole isn’t helpful. The world won’t be destroyed. (If you promise annihilation and are visited simply by devastation, it reduces credibility in an unnecessary way.)
The purpose of Earth, from the point of view of most humans, is to act as a comfortable host of humans. We are destroying the Earth by making it no longer fit for that purpose. I don’t think anybody reads “destroy Earth” and interprets it as something more like, “get rid of the iron ball as well.”
Unless you are one of those deep-sea vent dwelling creatures, we’re risking changes to the planet that will affect your life eventually.
Most people should already be seeing changes to their life in a statistically significant way.
But the AMOC collapsing doesn’t mean plenty of the Earth isn’t comfortable for humans. Global temperatures peaking in their pessimistic state still leaves, for better or for worse, most of the industrialized world viable. Poorer. Less comfortable. But viable nonetheless.
This is important because committing to long-term projects requires avoiding nihilism and complacency. Pitching everything as disaster tips into the former.
If we're trying to use precise language, the economic modelling [0] actually suggests they will be wealthier and more comfortable than they are now. Just probably not as wealthy and comfortable as they could be under other hypotheticals.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_analysis_of_climate_c...
It wasn't a scenario where the Earth is literally annihilated by a black hole, or a super nova, or a meteor or a GMB, it was a scenario where the world is functionally ruined for human life as we know it in a time-scale far shorter than we can muster up the resources to stop or even mitigate it.
So like, what's going on here? Is your response a subconscious coping strategy to change the topic to something more comfortable than one of impending doom for the human species and civilization as we know it?
Sure. The AMOC collapsing doesn’t do that. It makes life shit for a lot of people. But it doesn’t make the Earth uninhabitable for humans or technological civilization.
“Destroy the earth” is hyperbole. Cause mass starvation, associated wars and refugee crises, and mass extinctions with renewed vigor are not.
Unless someone stands up and says "no smoking in the house" ... people are going to keep smoking.
Sure. But if if someone says the house will burn down when the first person lights up, and they’re ignored, and it doesn’t, that doesn’t help. Most importantly because it isn’t true.
Here's a plausible scenario -- European countries decide that they will just power through the cold Frostpunk style by burning massive amounts of hydrocarbons and some other societies in regions suffering from the heat due to climate change decide that this course of action is unacceptable and war breaks out.
The theme of climate change is feedback loops and one way checkpoints. The increasing rates of change from these feedback loops and how societies respond may doom the plant and life as we know it.
This isn't hyperbole.
If Russia hasn’t used one on Ukraine, it doesn’t seem likely that a country mad about its climate would just destroy the world.
As you said, we’ve had plausible scenarios for actually destroying industrial civilisation since the middle of the Cold War. We dealt with it by having the population ignore it while a few nuclear states manage the risks. That doesn’t work for climate change.
We should always try to speak with precision, but not for the sake of people who will dismiss it no matter what you say.
I am pretty sure you can do better than that.
That assumes Iceland consider "National Security Risk" as politically charged as it is in other major countries.
this might sound very pessimistic
but the world has noticed _very long ago_
the first calculations about the greenhouse effect where in 1896!
in the 50th/60th it increasingly more clear that there might be a huge problem
in the 70th it became clear that there might not just be a huge problem but most likely is one, even if there wasn't yet scientific consensus on it
in the 80th scientific consensus was formed that there is human accelerated climate change and that it's a huge problem
since then outside of a very small fraction (depending on year, but in general <10% of scientist) the question wasn't if it is happening or if it is quite bad, but how "exactly" it will play out and how bad exactly it will get with options ranging from quite bad, over parts of earth becomes inhabitable for human where currently up to ~1000000000 people lives, to risk of human extinction in the long run (indirectly by causing a mass extinction event from a combination of climate change being to fast in combination with other environmental damages done by humans). Sure there have been other effect overlying climate change and people have tried to use them to explain climate change away, but consistently fail, sadly only from a scientific POV and not from a convincing people they don't have to worry POV.
And now in 2025 we have on of the most powerful nations of the world deciding that climate change is a scam, not based on data or analysis but based on it benefiting companies owned by some of their most influential citizens. And started systematically removing access to all public data they had previously gathered about climate change basically trying to rewrite history. And that at a time where large part of the US are currently being severely affected by long term environmental abuse. And yes abusing the environment isn't the same as climate change, but we could take a hint that if something has pretty bad effect on a local scale that then something similar done globally will probably have pretty bad effect globally.
It's also not like we don't know that currently _already_ whole nations (e.g. Philippines) are in the process of sinking. Or the amount and level of extrema weather conditions has constantly increased. Or that heat related death are constantly increasing. Or that there are gigantic dead areas in the oceans (through likely not caused by climate change, but this other kind of environmental catastrophes overlap with it putting even more strain on nature).
And still overall the trend of the last few years is to do less about it, not more. Because it is seen as luxury counties can't afford in a very strained world economy.
And people very commonly speak about it's anyway to late why bother, when we are speaking about a gradual effect not a binary yes/no switch.
I honestly don't have optimism about it anymore, there is no indication for me to believe thinks will get better until it's way way to late to prevent a catastrophe.
And don't get me wrong, humanity will (probably) survive, we are quite good at that. And there most likely will be a future where children can have a nice happy live. But before that for reasons not limited to climate change things probably will go to shit for a few decades, maybe even a century. But don't worry as long as people still try to make things better, things will get better again, it just might take some time.
But if I where living close by the coast or close to the equator, or in a area which already has common extrema weather, I would make sure my children grow up somewhere else.
bah that was such a downer to write, but it is my take on the topic anyway
Even 1824 by Fourier
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect#History_of_d...